Frans Hals

Frans Hals, (born 1581/85, Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]—died Aug. 29, 1666, Haarlem, Neth.), great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to Impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew older. The jovial spirit of his early work is typified by The Merry Company (c. 1616–17). In his middle age his portraits grew increasingly sad, revealing sometimes a sense of foreboding (e.g., Nicolaes Hasselaer, c. 1630–33). The paintings of his old age best show his genius for portraying character (e.g., Man in a Slouch Hat, c. 1660–66).

Early life and works

Hals left no written evidence about his life or his works, and only a brief outline of his biography is known. He was the son of a clothworker from Malines (Mechelen), Spanish Netherlands, and a local woman, and the family had moved from Spanish-held Flanders to Haarlem in the free Netherlands by 1591 at the latest; the local town-hall records give this date for the christening of Frans’s younger brother Dirck, who also became a painter. Except for a brief visit to Antwerp in 1616, Frans Hals lived all his life in Haarlem.

What he did for the first 25 or 30 years of his life is not known. The earliest indication of his activity as an artist was that about 1610 he joined the Guild of St. Luke of Haarlem, a body empowered to register artists as masters. Shortly afterward he married his first wife, Annetje Harmensdochter Abeel. She bore him two children before her death in 1615. Two years later, Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, who was to survive her husband by some nine years. In all, Hals had 10 children, and 5 of his 8 sons became painters. None, however, was of note.

Tradition has it that Hals was the pupil of Carel van Mander, a minor painter and poet who helped found a successful painting academy at Haarlem. There is no evidence either to support this claim or to refute it. From the beginning, however, Hals’s work conflicted with the typical mannerisms of his presumed master. His early work is actually closer in spirit to that of Jacob Jordaens, who was an outstanding Baroque painter from Antwerp and a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens. The good humour of Hals’s popular scenes recalls the joyous gatherings painted by the contemporary Dutch followers of the earthy, sensuous Italian painter Caravaggio.

Hals seems, from the evidence of extant works, to have begun his career with sober portraits and with group portraits of members of the local guilds and military societies. The best of these early works—which already shows complete competence in portraiture—is a monumental painting titled Banquet of Officers of the Civic Guard of St. George at Haarlem (1616), painted with a loose brushstroke technique that is unlike anything else in Dutch art of the time. It already has a sense of life and of the relationship between the figures that was then unknown in this type of subject matter. By at least 1620, however, Hals had begun to introduce into his paintings the jovial spirit that characterized his early works and that portrays with accuracy and enthusiasm one important aspect traditionally ascribed to Dutch character. Many of his portraits are simply pictures of merrymakers. The portrait of Hans Wurst in Merrymakers at Shrovetide (c. 1615) shows the sitter in a tall wide-brimmed hat, wearing a necklace made of pig’s feet, herrings, and eggs. The portrait of Mr. Verdonck (c. 1627) shows the subject joyfully brandishing the jawbone of a horse. Similar in spirit are the portrait of Peeckelhaering (c. 1627) clutching his beer mug, The Merry Toper, and two later portraits—a picture titled Malle Babbe (c. 1630–33), which portrays an old madwoman laughing, with an owl perched on her shoulder, and a joyful picture in the Louvre Museum of a laughing, suggestively dressed young Gypsy woman (1628–30).

In Hals’s group portraits too, the spontaneous joie de vivre that is evident in the individual portraits is felt to a degree that revolutionizes the hitherto austeregenre. One such painting is his second Banquet of Officers of the Civic Guard of St. George at Haarlem (1627), in which the figures take up postures normally employed for the expression of mystical religious rapture to celebrate their well-nourished contentment. In this painting, Hals displays his unmistakable genius for mise-en-scène; the dramatic effects he achieves here set him apart from most other painters. His militiamen are linked in a harmonious composition that makes the viewer aware of the cohesion of their group as a whole. Each conducts a dialogue with his neighbour, and here and there one figure is made purposely to disrupt the scheme with a gesture or a glance in the viewer’s direction. Nothing is happening except a meal shared by typical members of the Dutch middle class and their conversations. Yet there is a majesty to this scene that is equal to any depiction of an incident from the life of a king. This painting also hints at the sense of mysterious spirituality, which, fostered by the artist’s intimate knowledge of his subjects, came with his maturity to thread its way into his absolute realism.

By the 1620s Hals had definitively evolved a technique that was close to Impressionism in its looseness. Like the contemporary Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, he used colour to structure forms, and this use of colour is what sets the two artists apart from their contemporaries. Unique to Hals, however, is his use of quick, loose strokes of bright colour that suggest rather than enclose form and are highly expressive of movement and of the subjects’ vitality. Most painters of the 17th century approached their paintings slowly, with preparatory drawings, a certain amount of underpainting, and an elaborate finish. Although there is no certain evidence of his method, Hals seems to have started directly on the canvas and painted quickly, leaving his first spontaneous expression, which is almost an oil sketch, as the finished work. Hals continued to use this technique, which gave a striking immediacy to his perceptive portrayals of character, all his life, painting with increasing freedom as he grew older.

It has often been suggested that Hals’s life resembled the lives of the bon vivants he portrayed at the beginning of his career. It is true that from 1616 he began to incur claims from creditors, and he was in financial difficulties most of his life. He belonged, however, to the Haarlem St. George militia company and was a member of the Haarlem society of rhetoricians called De Wijngaertranken in 1618–19; both these facts are quite inconsistent with the romantic picture of dissipation that traditionally has been associated with the painter. Moreover, the stern preachers and theologians, the high-ranking officials, the surgeons, the admirals, the writers, and the respectable shopkeepers whose portraits Hals painted in great numbers were not likely to have posed for a dissolute person.

Later life and works

At any rate, the joviality began to disappear from the paintings of Hals’s middle age. In the portraits painted after he reached age 40, the subjects seem to eye the world knowingly, with a shade of sadness in their faces. The earliest portrait that strongly shows this quality is Man with Arms Crossed (1622). Others follow that contain the same theme: The Laughing Cavalier (1624), Portrait of Isaac Abrahamszoon Massa (1626), Pieter van den Broecke (1633), Nicolaes Hasselaer (c. 1630–35), Willem van Heythuyzen (c. 1637–39), and Daniel van Aken Playing the Violin (c. 1640). These portraits seem to reveal a sense of foreboding; still, their mood ranges somewhere above the midpoint in the “human comedy.” The period from 1630 to 1650 was Hals’s most productive. He was very popular among the staid citizens of Haarlem’s middle class, and during this time he painted more than 100 single portraits and 6 group and family portraits.

Hals lived to be very old, and it is in the paintings of his old age that his genius for portraying human character is fully revealed. The last years of his life were difficult materially, and he was harassed by discouraging family problems. Although he continued to work steadily, he received markedly fewer commissions after 1650. He had, during his long career, achieved an impressive reputation; he had been honoured by many important commissions, had become in 1644 an officer of the Guild of St. Luke, and in 1649 had painted the philosopher René Descartes. Still, although some continued to value his subtle perceptions, the public had generally begun to favour a more elegant style made popular by the portrait painter Anthony Van Dyck in England. What commissions he did receive were not enough to support him, and, like his two great compatriots Rembrandt and Vermeer, he saw his possessions sold at auction for debt (1654). It was not until 1662 that his right to public assistance was recognized, and he was accorded a yearly pension by the city. In spite of this adversity, the portraits of Hals’s last 16 years are his masterpieces. At this point, his paintings reveal a view of the world in which the human comedy takes a tragic turn, and something breaks in the order that had kept the reasonable man and the madman separated. His portraits, no longer tempered by laughter, seem to express a realization that simply being is enough, after a certain age, for life to impress its tragic seal.

Henceforth, Hals drew gradually closer to traditional subjects and stored away his drinking glasses and his tableware. At the same time he diminished the intensity, the vividness of his themes, a greater simplicity appeared in his compositions, and he took more and more liberty with his painting. His palette lost a good deal of its lustre. But through decades of work he had evolved a remarkably broad range of blacks and whites to choose from, and these colours were sufficient for what he wanted to show.

From 1650 on, his subjects begin almost to look awestruck, and Hals ceases to bind his compositions into powerfully articulated human masses. Instead, he strings the solitude of each figure together on a flimsy thread, with the pattern broken only here and there by some ultimate spark of vitality. The light seems to act as a nervous system in his subjects that whips their drowsy flesh back to life, and the magic of the brushwork seems to startle their faces out of a swoonlike slumber. In the two celebrated portraits of the Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House at Haarlem (both 1664), one a group of old men and the other of old women, each group is shown with an individual in charge of the day-to-day operation of the almshouse. Interpretations of these paintings have varied throughout the centuries. For many years at least one of the men was thought to have been shown drunk (now many think that the painter was depicting a real-life facial paralysis), and the women were thought to have been presented in an unflattering light. In the 21st century many scholars believe that Hals was simply presenting the aging men and women as they appeared. Perhaps his subjects shared the old painter’s humility in the face of destiny. Thus, the harmony in the colourful blare of the early works came to be succeeded by an art that seemed to give form to elusive nervous twitches, to sudden motions, and to heartbeats accelerating only to falter and start again. All his life Hals had acted as a lucid observer of Haarlem. He painted it in the loud mirth of youth, and, reflecting in the image that he made of it his own life and declining health, he remained its faithful companion until his death.

Old age fostered self-denial and a strict discipline in Hals, along with a new freedom in his painting. It most certainly was a painful time for the great painter. But the years had also sharpened his vision. There is no sign of religion in the evolution of his art, and it may be assumed that to Hals painting was a secular concern. Nevertheless, the loving compassion that permeated his art became, in his last years, something spiritual.

Like many artists whose style is unique in their own time, he left few direct followers; the closest was Adriaen Brouwer, who used Hals’s techniques well to portray tavern scenes and similar subjects. Hals was for a long time regarded as a competent but limited painter whose consistent neglect of any subjects other than portraits gave him no place in the history of significant art. It was not until the 19th century that interest in his work was revived. He influenced Édouard Manet with his free style and Vincent van Gogh with his subtle range of colours. In modern times he has been appreciated for the serious and excellent realist painter that he was.